abandonware games sorted by popularity

Ready to guess wildly about the cost of household objects from the comfort of a DOS screen? The Price is Right (1990, DOS) brings the TV game show to your keyboard with a mixture o...

Before Titanic was a movie with a lot of weeping, there was Beyond the Titanic, a text adventure where surviving the iceberg is just the beginning. The game takes the historic disa...

Released during the holiday season of 1993, _Jetpack: Christmas Special_ wraps the classic gameplay of Jetpack in festive decorations and seasonal cheer. Beneath the snow-covered v...

Building on its predecessor, Labyrinth of Worlds expands the formula by throwing you across multiple dimensions. Each world has its own flavor—icy wastelands, alien landscape...

By 1992, Vol. 3 wrapped up the trilogy with even more complex scenarios. At this point, the series had become less of a game and more of an interactive textbook—though that&r...

In Infidel, you play a not-so-noble adventurer whose moral compass is spinning like a broken ceiling fan. As a treasure-hungry explorer poking around an ancient Egyptian tomb, you ...

Step into the cockpit of the Apache Longbow, a 1995 combat flight simulator where you’ll experience the thrilling sensation of trying to figure out keyboard controls before g...

If you’ve ever dreamed of commanding a submarine in the middle of the Cold War but didn’t want to deal with actual torpedoes, GATO is your safe harbor. Released in 1984...

With Might and Magic 4: Clouds of Xeen, the series heads to the colorful world of Xeen, where the sky is bright, the monsters are plentiful, and the sense of adventure is delightfu...

Do you find spreadsheets thrilling? Does the idea of profit margins make your heart race? Then Business Simulator is your kind of party. It’s all about running a faceless com...

Before management sims became a genre unto themselves, RAPCON tried its hand at turning air-traffic control into entertainment. Surprisingly, it works—if you enjoy stress. Yo...

Published in 1988, Lombard RAC Rally captures the demanding world of rally racing with challenging courses, changing terrain, and an emphasis on precision driving. Unlike tradition...

X-COM: Apocalypse takes the familiar alien invasion formula and tosses it into a sprawling futuristic city, where things feel both more chaotic and oddly more personal. Instead of ...

Come one, come all, to the saddest circus ever pixelated. In Ballyhoo, you're stuck in a depressing carnival trying to solve a kidnapping while dealing with clowns, carnies, and th...

Action Soccer (1995, DOS) is what happens when you try to make a soccer game fun without worrying too much about realism, physics, or gravity. The ball bounces like it’s fill...

Acheton (1987, DOS) is one of those text adventures where the game cheerfully tries to kill you every five minutes — and does so with words. You're tossed into a sprawling, b...

Ultimate Body Blows is a fighting game that boldly enters a genre dominated by arcade giants and says, “We can do this on a PC keyboard.” Inspired heavily by Street Fig...

Before the shades, the muscles, and the one-liners, Duke Nukem was just a guy in a 2D platformer trying to save the world from an evil scientist. It’s bright, fast, and glori...

Doofus (1994) is what happens when platformers go slightly off the rails. You guide a floppy-haired kid through surreal, cartoony landscapes filled with hazards that feel more anno...

Ulises is a mythological adventure that wears its classical inspiration proudly, even when the technology struggles to keep up. Drawing loosely from Homer’s Odyssey, the game...

Moraff's Dungeon of the Unforgiven is a first-person dungeon crawler filled with monsters, exploration, treasure, and the sort of dark corridors that strongly suggest turning aroun...

Saddle up for an awkward mix of minigames that vaguely resemble rodeo events. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show tries to recreate the excitement of a 19th-century traveling circus but ...

What happens when a basketball game forgets about realism and goes full cartoon? Basket Master (1990), that’s what. This Spanish-developed DOS gem pits two oddly animated bal...

Subwar 2050 takes submarine warfare into a futuristic setting, replacing conventional naval combat with sleek vessels, hostile waters, and enough advanced technology to make a peri...

Reelect JFK is a 1994 Windows 3.x political simulation built around the idea of changing history by managing John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign and attempting to secure anothe...